April 10, 2005, Sunday

By the end of Michael Connelly's 10th Harry Bosch novel, THE NARROWS (Little, Brown, $25.95), Bosch, a retired California homicide cop, has settled old scores, walked away from his equivocal professional dalliances with the F.B.I. and made up his...

If Spenser is the invincible knight, the timeless hero of American detective fiction, then Jesse Stone, the protagonist of a more recent series by Robert B. Parker, is the flawed hero of the moment, a man whose deficiencies define his humanity....

A moody chap on the sunniest of days, Peter Robinson's Yorkshire copper, Inspector Alan Banks, slips into a melancholy funk in CLOSE TO HOME (Morrow, $23.95) when he returns to his boyhood home -- indeed, to his own narrow bed in his old room in his...